How two female writers were pushed out of Idris Elba's debut play Tree

Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley claim the play contains work of theirs for which they have not been credited or compensated

Last week should have been a special one for Idris Elba. After spending years developing a piece of musical theatre, Tree finally had its premiere at the Manchester International Festival. Unfortunately for Elba, however, the debut was overshadowed by accusations of plagiarism.

In a Medium article published last week, Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley claim that the musical stage play contains work of theirs for which they have not been adequately credited or compensated.

Directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah (the artistic director of the Young Vic Theatre, where the show is scheduled to run after the Manchester International Festival), Tree is an immersive and multi-disciplinary production (according to The Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington, there are no seats and the audience is called upon to dance at one point) about a young mixed-race British man who goes to South Africa to search for his roots.

To understand the claims being made by Allen-Martin and Henley, we have to go back to 2013 when Allen-Martin, a performer, writer and musician working primarily in the U.K., travelled to South Africa with Elba to work on his album mi Mandela. Two years later, according to her and Henley’s post, Elba asked her to develop an original theatre piece using the music from mi Mandela.

We’ve been clear that what matters to us through all of this is the wider conversation that from the incredible support of so many of u evidently needs 2be had. What matters tonight is ppl have worked hard, whether or not we’re recognised as a part of that. Go get ‘em #BurnBrightpic.twitter.com/s7yr7GmM2W

Allen-Martin founded her own independent production company called Interval Productions in 2009, and has written and produced several original musicals since then. Alongside Henley, a British writer and director, the two have become frequent collaborators, and were both selected to be on the BBC New Talent Hotlist in 2017.

Allen-Martin and Henley write that in 2016, the pair signed a commissioning agreement to develop the show that would become Tree, and that they had been working on the first draft of the show for a year leading up to that. “In March 2016, we signed the commissioning agreement, which gave us the right to veto any other writer brought in, and to approve any changes in the script,” their post reads. “It also entitled us to a royalty should the show go ahead.”

According to their timeline, they continued to work on the script through several workshops in 2016. Kwei-Armah joined the project in 2018, when the Young Vic and the Manchester International Festival became partners for the show. They were initially excited about this development and looked forward to the collaboration. But in July of 2018, they say, they began to get the run-around on meetings.

“Between June and October, there were multiple emails and phone-calls between Tori, Sarah and MIF suggesting that delays were merely down to difficult scheduling with Idris and Kwame’s diaries, along with reassurances that the project was happening,” they write. Instead, they later learned, the project had continued to be developed without them, and Kwei-Armah had re-worked the script, while still keeping many of the characters and plot points that they had come up with.

That fall, the production of Tree was announced, but Allen-Martin and Henley’s names were nowhere to be seen on the promotional material. After they declined an offer to “ghost-write” a new script for the show for a paltry amount of money in a very short timeframe, their agents were told that Tree was considered a new production, so Allen-Martin and Henley’s contract was meaningless. They had effectively been pushed off the show without credit or compensation.

In the world of theatre, it’s not unusual for writers to leave a production after a workshop and have the work picked up and re-developed by someone else. Allen-Martin and Henley even acknowledged this in their article. But they’re upset with the way they were treated and frozen out, especially as they are young, up-and-coming female artists and this represented a major opportunity.

Meanwhile, Elba and Kwei-Armah both deny Allen-Martin and Henley’s version of events, and firmly oppose their accusations of plagiarism. Kwei-Armah has written a public letter to Allen-Martin and Henley that is posted on his Twitter feed. His tone is compassionate (although some might say condescending — he begins by saying he “understand(s) the pain of being ‘released’ from a project”). He claims that the original script Henley and Allen-Martin wrote for the earlier workshop “was not a project I would be interested in producing.” He maintains that he was always open to collaborating on a new draft.

It being 2019, Elba has also published a statement on Twitter, which is very much aligned with Kwei-Armah’s. He says that after the workshop, “in order to secure a commission, we all understood that it had to take a new direction” and that “as new ambitions started to be proposed as the jumping off point for development, Tori & Sarah decided they didn’t want to pursue the early thoughts and declined to work any further on the project.”

But perhaps the most scandalous part of this entire controversy is that it has resulted in a lot of attention being paid to what critics have mostly seen as a middling production. The staging is inventive and invigorating but, according to the BBC arts critic, “the writing is just plain bad.”

Meanwhile, Allen-Martin and Henley have started a new initiative called Burn Bright, which aims to support emerging female writers with bursary funds and a mentorship network. “We didn’t want to complain about what happened to us without doing something to drive positive change for female writers that come after us,” they write on the website. Their efforts have already raised more than $23,000, including enough to cover their recent legal fees.